


Ice Can't Melt Fire // Magma Can't Cure Frostbite

by PresAlex



Category: Septimus Heap - Angie Sage
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Introspection, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 23:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16128683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresAlex/pseuds/PresAlex
Summary: Jenna Heap is the Castle's Queen. The Darkness from the jewels in her crown is seeping into her eyes.





	Ice Can't Melt Fire // Magma Can't Cure Frostbite

A crown is a heavy thing. The heaviness of gold, jewels, and gems is just enough that it can be forgotten. One can get used to a certain type of weight that drags down from the circle of their skull to the tenseness in their shoulders. Wearing a strange family of heritage is even more weight; the kind of weight which sticks behind eyelids and drags the corners of mouths down without mercy. The Castle’s Queen grew up surrounded by chaos. The tenseness in her shoulders, the headache behind her eyes, the ache in her wrists, it’s all new.

Once upon a time, the Castle Queen was a little princess who spent her evenings watching the lamps get lit across the waters and her days playing with magic and her older brothers. Her house was filled and complete with family living shoulder to shoulder, books stacked wall to ceiling and love shared equally. Even those days her shining violet eyes should have been enough to give her away, to allow some heaviness to reach out only to whisper at the edges of her hair and run its fingers along her cranium. In those days, however, she had tall brothers to hold her hand and smile away the stares. She had a lovely mother and father who would dance together in the square as musicians played in the streets.

A little boy took that all away from her. A little boy with cold grey eyes and a cautious demeanour brought along a change in Jenna’s life that she would have never expected. A little girl who dreams of being a princess is very different than a little girl who is also a princess, after all. She didn’t feel it then, but as the circlet was placed on top of her hair, still slightly too big and lopsided, the darkness in her pupils seemed just a little bit darker. There was still snow dripping from their hair when his eyes twinkled green, but her eyes were always just the same no matter what she did. Four of her brothers left her to live with the monsters in the woods and were replaced by the rightful owner of her spot in the family. She thought he really should have been more grateful.

The taste of royalty bit back in the flavours of gold, ships, and absent fathers. The slice of freedom came in the form of lightning and haunted islands. She felt like she should have been more worried about getting off the island, or maybe even finding out why her new brother was acting the way he was, but she couldn’t drag her mind away from the sand in between her toes. Each day she spent living off the land, spending time with Beetle, and trying to talk to Septimus took a small weight from the back of her neck and threw it far into the ocean. She took off her circlet a few days in, relishing in the way her back could hunch without the threat of gold falling onto the dirty ground. Beetle thought her back cracked too much for a normal person her age, but that just came with the job.

Eventually, there was no choice for her but to take her rightful place in the Castle where her...mother had once stood. Her mother, who was--still covered in ghostly blood which dripped from a hole in her chest where her useless spectral heart sat-- strict clean and orderly, only showed herself to Jenna when she had to go on her very own Royal quest. Cold and unfeeling royal blood seeps like ice through Jenna’s veins until she locks up as if the blood painting the front of her mother’s translucent robes has infiltrated her circulatory system. The emotion heating up her face when her mother speaks to her for the first time, after years of pretending she didn’t exist, is definitely her father’s. The juxtaposition between the chill in her veins and the fire in her eyes makes her light-headed.

There’s a burning heat that comes with being in charge of a family’s legacy. It crawls underneath her fingernails and shoots up and down her legs with every step she takes. It only takes a few secret months to become accustomed to the fire. Somehow nothing is ever warm enough to melt the chill in her arms, the freezing hand print where her mother tried to hold her before remembering she couldn’t, that she was too late for that. There might by blood staining the front of Cerys’ gown but there’s blood staining every stone Jenna steps on and it’s never been hers. Nothing’s ever been hers. Her family wasn’t hers, the house wasn’t hers, **Magyk** wasn’t hers. What is hers is a frostbitten crown that sits on her thick black hair. She owns the flickering candle behind her eyes, along with its wax which drips out when she's alone, and the cold castle walls that surround her.

She’ll never belong to anyone properly. She can’t logically commit to anyone without pain accompanying her. She tried dating for a while when she first became queen, Beetle for a long time and even Marissa for a strange few months, but she could never be anyone’s when her name was already scrawled in blue blood in the foundations of the Castle, in the circle of itching pain surrounding her wrists, in the shining gems laid in her crown. She’d reach out if she needed any help with the shadowed spikes pulling her eyelids low and her hands to her chest--just to check. She was becoming less sure of the fact that it wasn’t her heart that was leaking down the front of her velvet cloak. No one could possibly hope to stay close to her with the ice coating her hands and the flame in her eyes.  


Loneliness hung around Jenna Heap like a funeral shroud, but it didn’t dare touch her for fear that it would burn.

**Author's Note:**

> It's literally been a year since I did anything Septimus Heap related but I thought of that closing line and needed to write this so ta da  
> find me @crykea


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